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Vice chancellor’s words disturbing; we have the right to voice opinions


Last Monday night in the game room of the campus UC, I witnessed and participated in a disturbing event. Some thirty or more UTM students by my rough estimate, with several faculty members, had gathered at an announced 5:00 meeting to express their collective opposition to the gathering storm of war in Iraq and to discuss legitimate, effective means of proceeding to protest that seeming inevitability.

Coming in a bit late, I noticed at once that the director of the Boling University Center was present in a front-row seat. A bit later I saw that the UTM Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs (VCSA) had also arrived.

Wow, I thought, naive as ever. Here two campus officials step forward to show symbolic support for a conscience-driven student initiative. Great.

Group discussions of what approaches might work best to oppose the invasion of Iraq soon moved toward resolution, with projections for further meetings and possible strategies including petitions and other symbolic gestures. About that time the VCSA moved forward.

Sitting on the stage in the corner of the game room where on other nights an “open mic” event might transpire, letting students express themselves unsupervised on most any topic, the VCSA started her discourse by saying that she hoped she didn’t “rain on your parade” but that today she had “read the law.”

The group, she said, would need to be recognized as an official campus organization before it might be granted the right to reassemble in future weeks in university facilities. This procedure might take time. Her tone was businesslike, polite, and carefully not antagonistic or belligerent.

Ambushed without warning, the nimble student moderator arranged, as best she could manage on the spot, to meet the expectations of the VCSA by appointing officers and otherwise trying to begin to satisfy the university bureaucracy so as to allow the on-going existence of the group and to permit its reconvening.

In attendance as a supporter, the student leader of ALLIES, an already approved campus group, offered to have the anti-war supporters meet temporarily under the aegis of her organization. One of the UTM faculty members present agreed when asked to have his name put down for the record as an official sponsor.

The VCSA offered to help the student leaders of the group expedite the process of “approval.” The director of the UC volunteered to regard the group as a prospective organization. All ended well.

Or did it?

The right of free and open discussion becomes not just a constitutionally mandated prerogative but a necessity in a season when a US-initiated invasion of another country looms as a horrendous eventuality.

My experience Monday night leads me to question whether UTM students, within campus confines, enjoy the same ad hoc right to convene and openly address current issues that citizens of any small town in the country could assume to be theirs.

Here, it appears, the discussion must emanate from an “officially sanctioned” group, or it cannot occur in an on-going way. Any topical group with a left-of-center agenda probably would do well to announce its meeting at La Canasta or Iman’s.

The right of free assembly and of free and open discussion of life-and-death matters seemed to me seriously in jeopardy at UTM Monday night, with a phalanx of officialdom geared up to mine its path.

A nimble response from students, put on the defensive without advance notice, was all that furthered that right of discussion on campus, for one more week at least.

Maybe the mistake of the group was to announce itself in advance as a “group” of students and faculty and to be open and honest about its purposes. In any case, the role of a valid university ought to be to applaud principled discussion and peaceable forms of public expression, not to put up obstacles.

Any system that requires formal organization and official local recognition of a “group” before students and faculty can proceed to address an impending world crisis is clearly a system that needs to rethink its cumbersome machinery.

The implicit message that university officials delivered to us Monday night in the UC was, I think, transparent to the students and faculty members present:

Proceed with caution in unsettling the still waters. If you want to contemplate unjust wars and ways to protest them, you might just stick to reading Thoreau.

Dr. Roy Neil Graves is a professor of English at UTM.